About one liners, pigeonholes and niches

My art sometimes does not make sense. Like what is that heron doing there? But that’s just me.

Pick an area. Be known for one thing. Be able to describe what you do in one line. Make it easy for people to remember you.

That’s the usual advice from gurus. To me that’s picking a pigeonhole. I kind of followed it for eight months. Finance and risk management and AI. That’s my little pigeonhole. A combination of my 18 years in MAS as a regulator and inspector, my academic background in financial engineering, computer science, AI research, as well as my experience writing Singapore’s first AI risk management guidelines for the financial sector.

Darn logical. But it also felt a little suffocating.

A delivery week. A session for a bunch of senior Chinese regulators. A one-hour presentation that required presenting in Mandarin. Probably the most challenging thing I did this year. Accepted a new gig with an international organization. And one with a civil service institute. And plenty of writing and painting.

At the end of the week, I decided I am a weird guy, not a guy who wants to be known for just one thing.

Many things, not one thing

I’m fairly weird.

Engineering undergrad in Toronto who cut classes for art school. Arts policy civil servant who went to a financial regulator. Basel capital rules person who became a quant model risk inspector. Investment risk head who did a mid-life PhD in computer science. AI risk person who paints watercolors of disappearing Singapore at midnight. Introvert who cannot work a room and hates large events with lots of strangers. But who can talk non-stop for a full day when training people and genuinely enjoys it.

The usual advice from gurus assumes that the same thing works for everyone. I’m starting to feel that is just not me.

When I left MAS this approach made sense. And it kind of worked. I’ve managed to make a living. But it had costs.

Every time someone introduced me as the AI governance person, I felt like saying I don’t even like all these fluffy governance principles.

Every time someone said I was only suitable to do technical AI stuff because of my background, I was like, why would you want someone who only knows it at the surface level.

The whole Simply Boring AI set of ebooks I built was because people kept assuming someone technical like me could not explain something for nuts.

And I still remember someone with no AI background saying I needed him to make AI governance land for senior folks. I found that quite offensive.

And every time I kept the art separate from the AI governance identity, I felt like I was hiding who I really was.

Why I think pigeonholes don’t make sense

Choosing a pigeonhole assumes you only have one thing that makes sense. One thing strong enough to stand alone, and simple enough for someone to repeat in a sentence.

But most people are rarely one thing. They are a few ordinary things that do not usually go together. The value sits in the combination, not in any single piece of it. And the combination is exactly what a pigeonhole ignores.

Scott Adams calls it a stack of mediocre skills that are worth more than the sum of its parts. I wrote about this previously.

Ok fine. I misrepresented it as a pigeonhole. Some of the gurus here may protest and say that what they mean is that we need a niche. And they are half right. Being easy to describe is useful. People need to know what to come to you for. The one line is not the problem. The problem is when someone else takes that one line and turns it into a pigeonhole, and keeps you there.

So if we really need a niche, perhaps we need to rethink it. The niche should not be just about what you do. It should be a rational intersection of everything you are. It should not cramp your style, but present your unique voice and point of view.

If you don’t fit one box either

Narrowing to one thing usually turns you into a commodity. If plenty of people have your one thing, the pigeonhole becomes a race to the bottom on price. Being the best in the world at one skill is a brutal lottery. Being good at a few that rarely go together is more achievable, and often more useful.

So I try to focus on the problem, not the label. Problems that need several of my messy parts at once. Then folks cannot swap me out for someone better at one thing, or cheaper.

And the parts I was tempted to hide, because they complicated the story, turned out to be the difference. So I stopped hiding them. They are why someone picks me over the next person with the same title. More importantly, they are what makes me feel alive.

So when I hear advice about being one thing, I try to land in a niche and not a pigeonhole.

A pigeonhole is a box someone else puts you in, so they can find you quickly and file you away. It is built for their convenience. A niche, done properly, is one you build for yourself. It should hold everything you are, not the one thing that is easiest to introduce.

This matters more once you are on your own. Inside an institution, the title does the narrowing for you, and you have to live with it. In fact sometimes it is useful as it helps you reject work that falls outside the pigeonhole.

The trade for going independent was the freedom. So if I then let the market file me under one label, I would have swapped a boss for a pigeonhole.

So I am keeping my weird niche. It is hard to introduce in one line. But that’s fine. Who cares.

#IndependentLife #Niche #AIRiskManagement #Transitions #Reflections